This invention relates to electronic composition, and more particularly to a method of composing signatures.
The raw materials of electronic composition are text and image data that have not been paginated or otherwise composed. The electronic composition process groups or paginates the data as logical pages, with one or more logical pages destined to be printed by a printer on a physical page. After printing, the physical pages will be folded and assembled into signatures.
Present methods of electronic composition determine how to print two or more logical pages in sequence on each physical page by consulting look-up tables, stored in memory. These look-up tables are little more than electronic versions of the tables, derived empirically, that offset printers have used for years to manually compose signatures on offset presses. While generally adequate for electronic composition, look-up tables are inflexible and cumbersome, requiring unique entries for each possible combination of number of physical pages and pattern of logical pages on each physical page.